Kollaborate quarterly update - Q1 2026

We’re launching a new feature on this blog where we update you on the progress of Kollaborate every quarter. Because this is the first, we’re going to outline the past year and what we’re planning over the next quarter.

Over the past year we released our new Rust backend, which has allowed us to speed up and modernize many features of the site. We have gradually moved more and more features to the new backend, including file operations, viewing comments, file delivery, thumbnails, and some parts of the upload process. User-facing pages are still using the old backend but will speed up as more features are moved to the new backend.

The new backend also gives us a lot more insight into how well the service is operating, so we can respond more quickly to problems, especially problems that are region-specific and don’t affect the US where we are based.

We also added many new features including emoji comment reactions, instant file moves between projects, file tags, tagging a user in a comment, global search, template projects, saved searches, and more.

What we’ve been working on for the past five months or so is switching to a different storage provider. Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as just swapping over a URL and required us to account for a lot of different factors than we had to with our previous provider, so this has been a long, arduous process. But we’re almost at a place where we can switch over completely, so that will happen very soon.

Part of this process involved making significant changes to how we handle uploads. We rewrote our uploader to better handle every kind of possible network condition, as well as significantly speeding up the Finishing stage. This is most noticeable on larger files, where finishing will now take 1-2 secs irrespective of file size, where before it could take minutes for a very large file. We now have lots of stats about the upload experience to help us monitor and improve it, and our new system is able to detect problems automatically and route around them. 

Over the next quarter we plan to finish the storage changeover and begin to reap the benefits of switching storage providers,  including faster video encoding and improved video quality. We also have other features in the pipeline, such as new workflows, better accessibility, a new help center, a new video player, and a captioning overhaul, but not all of these will launch this quarter.

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. To find out more, see the overview or register for the free trial.